The obvious response to Manchester City's shock defeat at Newcastle was to cast further doubt on their title aspirations.

If a storming January had looked to have put their difficult December to bed, the performance at St James' Park brought back all the flaws that were exposed in their previous three league defeats and - as importantly - their nearest rivals were looking invincible.

What could have been a seven-point gap is now two and City have the opportunity to put pressure on again when they play Everton in midweek; that fixture is rearranged from the weekend of the Carabao Cup final, when Liverpool travel to Old Trafford.

If Liverpool drop further points against Manuel Pellegrini's West Ham on Monday night, City could even go top with a victory at Goodison.

"I can't do anything in that game, so now unfortunately we don't have one week off," he said. "Now we rest and prepare for Goodison Park. I cannot deny we prefer West Ham to beat Liverpool, but Liverpool would prefer Arsenal to beat us. That is normal. But I don't have influence on that. All we can do is win the next game.

"What we have to do is try to show which way we are a nice team. Against Newcastle we scored and didn't try again, again, and again, no fight and tried to score the second goal and then three or four days later, now we score and try to get the second and try to get more goals.

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"That's the big lesson we can learn from these four or five days. When that happens we are a team that can be proud for what we do. We spoke in the last days that we didn't recognise ourselves in the last game at Newcastle and today at least we came back."

Guardiola wrote in his programme notes ahead of the game not to be too concerned by the league table, and reiterated afterwards that things can change very quickly.

"After Newcastle, we already lose the Premier League. Everybody said seven points and today we are two.

“After the Newcastle game everybody was convinced, myself too, that Liverpool were going to beat Leicester and it would be seven points and it would be almost over.

“Now we are on two points and that’s why we don’t have to look too much at the table.”